Data Science newsletter – November 15, 2021

In as little as 10 to 15 years, software engineering may look more like a technical conversation between humans and computers than a process of manually refining specifications and code, and the software ecosystem must prepare for that future. That is just one of the conclusions of a study titled “Architecting the Future of Software Engineering: A National Agenda for Software Engineering Research & Development” that was released today by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University.

For this study, the SEI engaged the software engineering community and assembled an advisory board of senior thought leaders across commercial industry, academia and government, with participation from Microsoft, Google, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, DARPA and others. The board was chaired by Deb Frincke, associate laboratory director for national security sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. With their input, the study team worked to create the multiyear research and development vision and roadmap for engineering next-generation software-reliant systems.

A national nonprofit civil liberties group is calling on the University of Iowa College of Law to remove or revise a new question added to faculty evaluation forms asking how the professors have improved their law school’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — calling those terms “broad,” “subjective” and “political.”

“Incorporating such a question into faculty evaluations risks establishing an ideological litmus test for professors, which could impact promotion and tenure consideration and penalize faculty for holding a dissenting opinion on matters of public concern,” asserted The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE.

You.com, which bills itself as the world’s first open search engine, today announced its public beta launch along with $20 million in funding led by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff with participation from Breyer Capital, Sound Ventures, Day One Ventures, and others. The company says that the funds, will be put toward user growth, product, and technology as You.com scales its platform to new users on the public web.

As the economy moves online, it’s You.com’s assertion that the internet is becoming more centralized and controlled by a few powerful, ill-meaning tech corporations. By contrast, You.com cofounder and CEO, Richard Socher, claims that the company uses technology to help people “live better and more productive lives.”

Veterinarians at Pennsylvania State University have found active SARS-CoV-2 infections in at least 30% of deer tested across Iowa during 2020. Their study, published online last week, suggests that white-tailed deer could become what’s known as a reservoir for SARS-CoV-2. That is, the animals could carry the virus indefinitely and spread it back to humans periodically.

If that’s the case, it would essentially dash any hopes of eliminating or eradicating the virus in the U.S. — and therefore from the world — says veterinary virologist Suresh Kuchipudi at Penn State, who co-led the study.

Injury Prediction in Competitive Runners With Machine Learning

“What Facebook and, in all fairness, all companies want is to keep (people) on the platform for as long as possible so they can learn things about you,” said Sandra Wachter, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.

“(The metaverse) will just exacerbate problems that we already have,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The recent report was compiled at the request of President Joe Biden, who issued an Executive Order on “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad” a week after taking office. This is hardly the first time that the intelligence community has investigated climate change as a national security threat. In 2008, the National Intelligence Council compiled a National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) on the “National Security Implication of Global Climate Change to 2030,” which was and remains classified.

“[The NIE released this year] makes essentially three points, all of which we knew 15 years ago,” said Tom Fingar, who was Chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the NIA was completed in 2008 and presented the intelligence community’s findings to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in June of that year.

He ticked those main points off: “It’s not a made-up political hoax. That a lot of people, a lot of countries, don’t fully realize how serious this problem is and are not doing things that would be needed to ameliorate the severity or the effects. And there’s no technical, magic-bullet solution.”

Computer science is an example of a major that bears the brunt of these issues. In a message to students, the department recognized that many were unable to register for the courses they need to complete their degree requirements.

“While I can’t make any promises, please do know that we are trying to do our best to manage the resources we do have and, wherever possible, find ways to address the needs of students on the cusp of running out of time to complete the degree requirements for the major,” Ketan Mayer-Patel, an associate professor of computer science, wrote to the department’s email list.

Apple’s main goal might have been to create as many different and difficult ways to charge an electronic device as possible, but these days, it’s also interested in building cars. Up until now, it hasn’t been very successful at retaining partners, but automakers are secretly scared of the electronics giant. Many still don’t think that the company has what it takes to build cars, but recent talks with manufacturing behemoth Toyota might secure Apple a foot in the door, and now CJ Moore, a former engineer from Tesla has joined its ranks to assist on the new car effort. Moore will be working under Stuart Bowers, another ex-Tesla employee who led Tesla’s Autopilot team up to 2019.

Faculty members at several public universities in Florida are expressing concern about a proposal that would weaken employment protections for tenured professors.

The draft document, said to be written by a university provost, proposes rules that would make it easier for veteran faculty members to be dismissed. It has circulated among faculty at the University of Florida, the University of South Florida, Florida State University and the University of Central Florida.

Some faculty leaders contend the proposal sends a chilling message at a time when Florida’s commitment to academic freedom is under question.

The Dalles is adjacent to the mighty Columbia River, but the new data centers wouldn’t be able to use that water and instead would have to take water from rivers and groundwater that has gone through the city’s water treatment plant.

However, the snowpack in the nearby Cascade Range that feeds the aquifers varies wildly year-to-year and glaciers are melting. Most aquifers in north-central Oregon are declining, according to the U.S. Geological Survey Groundwater Resources Program.

Adding to the unease: The 15,000 town residents don’t know how much water the proposed data centers will use, because Google calls it a trade secret. Even the town councilors, who are scheduled to vote on the proposal on Nov. 8, had to wait until this week to find out.

Enrollment data across the past decade indicates student demand for electrical engineering and computer sciences, or EECS, and computer science, or CS, courses is increasing, leading some teaching assistants, or TAs, to advocate for increased departmental funding and decreased student enrollment.

Current student enrollment in EECS courses is up 7.2% and campuswide enrollment is up 6.6% since fall 2020, according to the campus College of Engineering.

Campus alumnus Murtaza Ali, who was a CS10 TA for four semesters, alleged the increase in CS majors coming from the College of Letters and Sciences, or L&S, coupled with a recent increase in cost of TAs hired on an eight-hour basis, has resulted in “more students than there are resources,” putting strain on TAs.

A team of engineers and clinicians have used 3D printing to create intricate replicas of human cochleae – the spiral-shaped hollow bone of the auditory inner ear – and combined it with machine learning to advance clinical predictions of ‘current spread’ inside the ear for cochlear implant (CI) patients. ‘Current spread’ or electrical stimulus spread, as it is also known, affects CI performance and leads to ‘blurred’ hearing for users, but no adequate testing models have existed for replicating the problem in human cochleae – until now.

The name may not slide off the tongue just yet, but NanoBioFAB, a minority woman-owned nanotech startup in the Frederick Innovative Technology Center Inc., is hoping to revolutionize medical mannequins. And, they’re partnering with West Virginia University to try to do so.

The company, which creates million-scale nanomaterial used in applications ranging from routine health monitoring to cancer detection, is working with WVU to improve clinical simulators. The effort, initiated through the Defense Health Agency Small Business Innovation Research program, is underway at Nanobiofab’s Frederick, Maryland, base of operations, as well as the David and Jo Ann Shaw Center for Simulation Training and Education for Patient Safety (STEPS) at WVU.

At a time when other higher education institutions are closing or merging because of a decline in the supply of high school graduates, the [Roux Institute in Portland, Maine] is among a small but largely unnoticed number of new colleges that are opening.

Some are focusing on high-demand disciplines such as technology, health and alternative energy. Others are serving the huge number of older, working Americans who never went to college or didn’t complete a degree. Still others are trying to remake higher education with new models that forgo top-heavy bureaucracies and expensive campuses — models that in some cases don’t look like conventional colleges at all.

All three strategies are in large part a reproach to traditional higher education, which has often failed to provide the right programs to the people who increasingly need them.

Often a client comes to us and says something like “We have a Knowledge Management problem. Our project teams can’t find the knowledge they need to deliver their projects. We want you to work with us to develop a better system to store and access project information”.

They have a Knowledge problem, which is a lack of access to project knowledge. They think this problem can be solved with Information tools, such as taxonomies, metadata, portals and search. They think better access to project documents is the answer. However you cannot solve knowledge problems with information tools alone (I say “alone”, as these tools will be part of the final framework) for the following reasons.

Firstly much of the knowledge of the organisation is never codified as information. People know more that they can tell, and tell more than they can write.